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In case anybody is curious...
Also note that the GPU runs much hotter under the Catalyst drivers than running either the r300g or r300c drivers.. It's very noticable. As far as I can tell, it's clocking up properly so I really don't know what's up with the temp difference. The Catalyst drivers are also burning through battery life faster, no doubt..

Maybe the open source drivers are bad at keeping the GPU fed, so more of the functional units sit idle for longer periods.

Laptops are frequently a special case because the OEMs often want customized drivers and as a consequence end up deciding that managing driver releases and updates themselves is the way to go, but AFAIK that has historically only applied to Windows drivers.

I've yet to see a single case where this is actually a good thing for the consumer. Without fail, the OEM supports 1 to 2 versions of Catalyst that came out when they were selling the hardware, and then they stop all support. After a couple of years without updates, those drivers inevitably start showing their age with performance problems and bugs in newer games.

Presumably, the OEM's are paying AMD lots of money for this, because otherwise they are just making themselves look bad for no reason.

If you are brave enough to hack the drivers, you can get the standard desktop drivers running on laptops. It's just not officially supported by anyone.

But yeah, the windows AMD laptop situation sucks. I can't see either how that can be spun as a good thing.

Yea, I don't get that part either.. I mean, if you buy a Desktop, then the Desktop manuf. provides AMD drivers on their website but everybody just goes to AMD's website to get them.. Try to do that with my laptop and you just get a great big wall around AMD's website which I always thought was strange. You even get the wall if you select Linux drivers from the main page for my hardware, but if you dig around you can eventually find the old Linux Catalyst drivers which I never knew ever existed until just these past few days.

Now there is solution of MP3 and H.264 "problems" for every Linux distribution. I just not understand why distribution developers not provide same solution for floating point and S3TC problems to end-users. There is report to Ubuntu Team for example: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...sa/+bug/823062

Now there is solution of MP3 and H.264 "problems" for every Linux distribution. I just not understand why distribution developers not provide same solution for floating point and S3TC problems to end-users. There is report to Ubuntu Team for example: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...sa/+bug/823062

One needs a standard API layer that translates to whatever software is in a distro. Use ZIP format for the package (free to use by anyone) and some kind of autorun language.

Linux standard base is not the answer. Stuff like Wine is, because it's a one-stop-shop for getting a plethora of (Win32) API software to run. 25 Xlib games not running on Wayland? Just port the layer.